“Really, Felix! who gave you a bill of sale to Miss Earl?  She should consider herself exceedingly fortunate, as she is the first of all your teachers with whom you have not quarrelled most shamefully, even fought and scratched.”

“And because she is sweet, and good and pretty, and I love her, you must interfere and take her off to entertain your company.  She came here to take care of Hattie and me, and not to go down-stairs to see visitors.  She can’t go, mamma!  I want her myself.  You have all the world to talk to, and I have only her.  Don’t meddle, mamma.”

“You are very selfish and ill-tempered, my poor little boy, and I am heartily ashamed of you.”

“If I am, it is because—­”

“Hush, Felix!”

Edna laid her hand on the pale, curling lips of the cripple, and luckily at this instant Mrs. Andrews was summoned from the room.

Scarcely waiting till the door closed after her, the boy exclaimed passionately: 

“Felix! don’t call me Felix!  That means happy, lucky! and she had no right to give me such a name.  I am Infelix! nobody loves me! nobody cares for me, except to pity me, and I would rather be strangled than pitied!  I wish I was dead and at rest in Greenwood!  I wish somebody would knock my brains out with my crutch! and save me from hobbling through life.  Even my mother is ashamed of my deformity!  She ought to have treated me as the Spartans did their dwarfs!  She ought to have thrown me into the East River before I was a day old!  I wish I was dead!  Oh!  I do!  I do!”

“Felix, it is very wicked to—­”

“I tell you I won’t be called Felix.  Whenever I hear the name it makes me feel as I did one day when my crutches slipped on the ice, and I fell on the pavement before the door, and some newsboys stood and laughed at me.  Infelix Andrews!  I want that written on my tombstone when I am buried.”

He trembled from head to foot, and angry tears dimmed his large, flashing eyes, while Hattie sat with her elbows resting on her knees, and her chin in her hands, looking sorrowfully at her brother.

Edna put her arm around the boy’s shoulder, and drew his head down on her lap, saying tenderly: 

“Your mother did not mean that she was ashamed of her son, but only grieved and mortified by his ungovernable temper, which made him disrespectful to her.  I know that she is very proud of your fine intellect, and your ambition to become a thorough scholar, and—­”

“Oh! yes, and of my handsome body! and my pretty feet!”

“My dear little boy, it is sinful for you to speak in that way, and God will punish you if you do not struggle against such feelings.”

“I don’t see how I can be punished any more than I have been already.  To be a lame dwarf is the worst that can happen.”